Tag Archives: multiple exposure

A Time to Reflect

“Reflection”

Today is a special day to reflect.  Life’s timeline is multidimensional.  The past, current, and future intermingle.  As I look back and reflect on loved ones who have passed, a warm, peaceful, and grateful feeling comes into my heart. That feeling transcends into a contemplative outlook of what is yet to come.

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Dogwood Impasto

160421_Dogwood ImpastoMultiple Exposure:  Dogwood Blooms and Asphalt Pavement

I got a little bored shooting in the garden.  Nothing was “Popping” for me.  So I thought I would have a little fun with multiple exposures.  This image is a combination of a Pink Dogwood branch and a texture photo of a section of asphalt pavement.  Magic happens.

To finish it off I decided to experiment a little with Topaz Impression.  Here I used the Impasto I preset.  Something a little different.

 

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Purple Crocus

150410_PurpleCrocus_ME by Karl Graf. Canon 5D MkIII, EF 180mm Macro 3.5L – Multiple Exposure

These purple crocuses came out two days after the white ones.  They do so every year.  The white crocuses come out with a few blooms first, followed by the rest a couple days later.  The purple crocuses seem to come out all at once.  I was lucky with a couple of nice warm days when the blooms emerged.  The last couple of days have been cold and rainy.  The crispness of the flowers are now gone.

For Lexie:  The way this image was achieved is different from the white crocus image in my post a few days ago.  Large telephoto lenses have a narrow depth of field.  My target here was to get enough depth of field to capture detail in the nearest petal, the center, and the farthest petal of the nearest bloom.  It took an aperture setting of f/16 to achieve this.  However, using this aperture also pulled in detail from the background flowers.  I then took an image with the widest aperture (f/3.5) of my lens which only captured the center of the nearest flower in focus.  The edges of the bloom and all the background blooms were not in focus.  To make sure the images would line up when I processed them, I used a tripod.

Back on my computer, I combined the f/3.5 and f/16 images into a multiple exposure using Photoshop’s layers.  The background layer was the sharp f/16 image.  The second layer was the f/3.5 image.  I added a layer mask to the second layer and “painted” through the nearest bloom of the f/16 flower.  I then lightened the sharp bloom and darkened the edges to get the final image.

The following is the f/16 SOC image as reference:

150410_PurpleCrocus_SOC by Karl Graf.

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Making the Best of It

 

130617_HersheyRoses1 by Karl Graf.

Karen and I had planned a trip up to Hershey, PA to see the Hershey Rose Garden for quite some time.  We delayed the trip one day due to an extremely severe rain and lightning storm that passed through the area.  We knew that the gardens would be impacted, but went the next day anyway.  The day was a beautiful bright summer day in the 80’s.  However, the roses had been damaged by the previous day’s storm as expected.  It was not the best for photography.  It was time to get creative and try some different things.

The image above is an “in-camera” multiple exposure of a group of roses with a water fountain in the background.  The first image was taken with a moderate depth of field at normal exposure.  The second image was defocused and slightly overexposed.  The combined image was adjusted for brightness with NIK Viveza and NIK Color Efex Pro.  A painterly look was then added with Topaz Simplify.

No matter what the condition, there always seems to be something worth capturing.

For reference below are the two images that were combined.

130617_HersheyRoses2 by Karl Graf. 130617_HersheyRoses3 by Karl Graf.

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